The 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage and the upcoming presidential election have brought voting rights to the forefront of American politics in 2020 and have prompted important questions about legacies of disenfranchisement, especially for people of color in the United States.

Inspired by the Long 19th Amendment Project, spearheaded by the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, this program will examine works from the collections at the Harvard Art Museums and Houghton Library that...

The LGBTQ community has made significant strides towards equality and progress in recent years, but has also faced renewed hostility and political setbacks. Across the country, practitioners and activists are working to mobilize a diverse coalition and encourage them to make their voices heard on Election Day. Join the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation as we discuss the priorities of LGBTQ voters and how they are being mobilized to get out and vote this November. Panelists include:

• Chasten Buttigieg, Fall 2020 Fellow, Institute of...

By the early 1980s, a new political landscape was taking shape that would fundamentally influence American society and politics in the decades to come. That year, the long-standing effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—championed by suffragist Alice Paul and introduced to Congress in 1923—ran aground, owing in significant measure to the activism of women who pioneered a new brand of conservatism. The power and organizational energies of conservative women provided one more proof that the suffragists’ notion of a universal women’s voting “bloc” was an illusion. But in the Reagan era...

The passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 marked one culmination of a long civil rights movement that began in the wake of the American Civil War and gathered steam in the early 20th century, long before the Montgomery bus boycotts and the emergent leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. inaugurated the best-known phase of the movement. Designed to restore the intention of the 15th Amendment, the VRA invalidated poll taxes, literacy tests, and other prerequisites and practices that had been used to disfranchise African American women and men in the states of the former Confederacy...